Painting Lyria, Female Centaur

In Sweden it's supposed to be SC Johnson's "Pledge KlarPolish" (make sure you get the one marked for plastic floors). Since I don't have a bottle or real Future, I can't really compare them. It seems to work for me in exactly the same way that Future works for everyone else.

Lyria has been staring at me from a strategic perch on my workbench for a long while now. I had placed her where I wouldn't be able to forget about her... and then promptly forgot about her. Bill asked me recently how the Masterworks figs were coming, and I realized I needed to get this mini knocked out!

I tend to focus on one or two areas for my Workbench articles. This one will be no different. My thinking is that I can explain a couple things in depth, rather than simply give an overview of the entire painting process. For this figure, I'll focus on how I painted three bits; Lyria's horsey-bits, her hair, and her bow.

I've explained how I paint hair at least once before, but I wanted to do it again for this figure, as I intend to paint her hair black. Highlighting black often gives people trouble, especially on hair – many times it comes out looking gray; we'll see if I can avoid that common misstep.

As ever, I start by cleaning and assembling the miniature. Needle files and my X-acto knife remove flash and mold lines, and then she gets a warm, soapy bath. In the first photo, you can see that I've got the bow in place (it's just held on with Blu-tack to get a feel for how it will look); once I start painting I'll leave the bow off... I do this to give easy access the stuff that would be hard to get to with the bow in place. Also, the bow attachment point is ludicrously fragile; there's no way it would survive the painting process intact! This makes me very concerned about shipping the figure - I'll have to do my best to attach it securely, and pack it very carefully.

Next, you can see that I've basecoated the entire figure in a deep, warm brown. It's warm because it's reddish. Red = warm, blue = cold. This color will be the mid-tone for the horsey-bits.

The third photo shows the mini after a liberal wash with a mix of black ink, brown ink, Future Floor Wax, and water (1:1:1:4 ratio). This establishes some shading, black-lines things for me, and brings out detail that might be hard to see. An additional benefit of the ink wash is that it creates a pretty tough layer – the wax does, anyway; this helps to keep me from rubbing paint off as I work.

In Photo 4, I've (pretty sloppily) painted my original brown onto the horse's muscles, I've been careful to leave some of the darker color showing.